Ayanbadejo edits sports edition of gay/lesbian paper

Aug. 28, 2013
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Brendon Ayanbadejo during a press conference where the NFL and the Washington Blade partnership announcement advancing LGBT issues in professional sports at Donovan House Hotel on June 6. / Kris Connor, Getty Images

by Erik Brady, USA TODAY Sports

by Erik Brady, USA TODAY Sports

Former Baltimore Ravens linebacker and marriage-equality advocate Brendon Ayanbadejo is guest editor of a special sports edition of The Washington Blade that hits newsstands Thursday.

Some of the stories are already online. One is a first-person piece by former Minnesota Vikings running back Sean James, who is now a model. James writes about the gay slurs that were casually bandied about in NFL locker rooms when he played in the early 1990s.

"It didn't occur to us that we were being offensive, let alone that there may have been a gay man on our team, in that locker room with us or, worse yet, laughing at those jokes out of fear," James writes. "That was my conditioning, my every day.

"Then I became a Ford model, and let's just say the locker room looked very different. I was the minority in almost every sense of the word. I was a minority as a black man, I was a minority as a muscular man with an 18-inch neck and I was a minority as a straight man. Everything that made me one of the boys in football now made me an outsider."

Kevin Naff, editor of the Blade, which styles itself as the national newspaper of record for the LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) community, said Ayanbadejo was active as guest editor.

"Anytime you work with a famous person, you risk a vanity project," Naff told USA TODAY Sports. "But I was pleasantly surprised how involved Brendon is, especially in recruiting" writers for the issue.

DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association, writes that the NFLPA insisted that sexual orientation be added to the non-discrimination section of the NFL's most recent collective bargaining agreement. "The addition of two words, sexual orientation, could have been easily overlooked," Smith writes, "but their inclusion speaks volumes to our belief that every individual deserves to be treated and protected equally under the law."

The issue includes a story by tennis great Martina Navratilova and a profile of Bobbie Dittmeier, a transgender editor for MLB.com.

Mark Lee, a Washington entrepreneur, writes: "When Olympians literally join hands in public spaces and on medal podiums at the Sochi Winter Olympics next February in defiance of the Russian government's anti-gay policies, they will embody and embolden the worldwide march toward gay equality."

Naff said the sports-themed issue is a first of its kind for the Blade. He anticipates doing it annually with different guest editors. Ayanbadejo, who won a Super Bowl ring in his last NFL game, is a longtime supporter of gay rights.